New Towns: Can They Work?
Lambeth, Edmund B.
New Towns: Can They Work? by Edmund B. Lambeth Writing two and a half years ago from Tarn House, Norwich, Vermont, H. Wentworth Eldredge, the Dartmouth urban scholar, looked at the near...
...Loans would defer repayment and interest for 15 yearswhich amounts to a substantial indirect subsidy...
...We may have reached a dead end in evolving an urban culture, at least in some respects...
...The new town is one of these illusions used to palliate the issues and get away from the problems...
...Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, and the National Association of Counties...
...Will the big corporations now buying land as a hedge against inflation be given the benefit of price accrual due to the government’s known plans for a new town...
...Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, unofficial poet laureate of the new town of Columbia, Maryland, has presided over a series of meetings on the subject attended by businessmen, Congressmen, bankers, labor leaders, and spokesmen for municipal governments...
...If Ylvisaker’s assessment is near the mark, several overriding questions face the Nixon administration...
...But aside from the expected opposition of some black separatists, the policies outlined in “The New City” have a remarkable unifying power...
...In the House of Representatives, one of the signers of “The New City” report, Thomas Ludlow Ashley (D-Ohio), persuaded Wright Patman (D-Tex...
...Arithmetic answers the separatists...
...Its population is expected to reach 16,000 in 10 years...
...By the most generous analysis, however, new towns built so far show little promise of relieving the American city of its unemployed or ill-housed...
...chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, to appoint a special ad hoc subcommittee on urban growth, of which Ashley is chairman...
...But the average member of Congress is like the citizen he represents...
...Land Corporation) and is building resort communities near Cleveland, Chicago, Gary, Kansas City, and Fredericksburg, Virginia...
...Can it find or afford the money to funda new-towns program on a scale large enough to influence the direction and character of urban growth...
...Radical departures are called for, both in reshaping our old communities and in designing the new...
...Its recommendations have the virtue of at least forcing the new-town advocates to face some of the harder questions...
...Walt Disney Productions, Inc., likewise is building a new community near Orlando, Florida, to introduce, test, and show off new technologies...
...After all, there is an escapist tendency in new-town thinking which leads people to where there are, or seem to be, no cocfining parameters and no conventionalism...
...Conference of Mayors, said in an interview that the mayors’ switch on new towns was merely an attempt to be constructive...
...The 12,000 acres on which Litchfield Park, Arizona (population lOO,OOO), is rising had been owned intact by the Goodyear Tire &Rubber Co...
...The report, which includes several essays financed by the Ford Foundation, was sponsored by Urban America, Inc., and-more significantly- the U.S...
...To help assure their success, Jackson held open the possibility of direct loans to pay interest and other carrying charges, loans for capital investment, “and possibly even capital grants...
...taxes can then be raised on a gradual basis after actual improvements are put in place...
...A much bigger community will take shape under UDC auspices in Amherst, a Buffalo suburb that is the site of a new state university campus...
...Few have visited a new town and those who have would be hard pressed to define what one is...
...Irvine, California, with 88 acres of debt-free land, is the inheritance of an old southern California ranch family...
...As a result, it bought Macco Realty- the developer of Porter Ranch in Los Angeles county and the owner of 100,000 acres in southern California...
...We cannot rely entirely on the incremental method to achieve the full measure of progress that is now necessary...
...Within the Nixon Administration, and in Congress as well, a “national urban policy” is increasingly regarded as an idea whose time has come...
...The ghetto, Funnye insists, has the least land available for the kind of large-scale industry which could create new jobs...
...It is clear,” he said, “that if the full range of potential benefits of new towns is tozbe realized, something more than the existing program is needed...
...Headed by planner Edward J. Logue, late of Boston and New Haven, UDC will break ground next spring on a new town 12 miles northwest of Syracuse...
...In the words of Dale City’s planner, who had hoped for a city of 80,000, the community now is “just like any other typical real estate development .” The problems facing a private newtown developer are formidable...
...Thus Dale City, Virginia, where 2,500 families have bought homes in a planned :dream community,” now finds itself barren of such promised amenities as golf courses, riding trails, and Olympicsized swimming pools...
...Even if new towns were to become home for 10 million Negroes in the next 30 years - a prodigious accomplishment - black voting strength in the central cities would not appreciably diminish...
...We must break loose the old and invent the new...
...The American new towns that have been able to meet all these conditions have been “flukes,” that is, special exceptions that prove the grim rules...
...As a venture of private capital, Columbia will be unable to reach and affect some of the gut social problems of American urbanization...
...And no one familiar with the way federal “loan programs” begin can have much doubt that direct subsidies would evolve...
...The bulk of this growth will occur on the fringe of some 20 metropolitan areas...
...General Electric dissolved its Community Systems Development division last February, after a two-year exploration of whether to enter the city-building business...
...Nathaniel A.Owings of San Franciso, principal in the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, told a recent St...
...The effort to build new towns may be a cathartic in our present system...
...But other large companies, less favorably situated with respect to the key ingredients of the new-town business, have found the entry barriers formidable...
...Many newtown advocates think so...
...The danger here is that needed resources and energies will be diverted from the problems of our cities...
...He advocates “deghettoization” via new towns and an aggressive open-occupancy program for the suburbs...
...Within the next 10 years alone, 26 million dwelling units will be needed...
...The excitement of a new town is real...
...Humble Oil Company had land, investment money as well as a product sales motive in mind when it began building Clear Lake City on 15,000 acres near Houston...
...An adequate supply of low-income housing...
...We kept getting asked about new towns in Congress and we didn’t want to be negative...
...In any event, the advocates of new towns have already begun to anticipate opposition from black-power separatists who claim, or will claim, that new towns are an attempt by the white man to decimate black majorities before they form...
...That land is in outlying areas...
...He must assemble enough land, arrange financing that is patient enough to wait 10 years for a profit, and find management experts who are willing to risk their reputations on one of the most difficult of all real estate ventures...
...Other big corporations enter the new-town business to push the sale of their products...
...Demographers predict a population increase of 100 million by the year 2000, consuming some 18 million acres of land...
...More specifically, the new town is winning favor as a concept that may do for the urban dilemma what the moon landing did for space exploration-supply a needed focus and furnish a symbol to stimulate commitment...
...If we are to build new communities, and I hope we will, we ought to be clear about our own motivation, since the possible motives are several...
...The Pennsylvania railroad found itself with money aplenty when forced under anti-trust laws to sell the Norfolk & Western Railroad...
...it also found that low-cost land and special financing were too difficult to assemble...
...President Nixon, in his population message, called the concept “stimulating...
...The President’s Urban Affairs Council, of which Dr...
...John Gunther, executive director of the US...
...Significantly, the report sponsored by the municipal lobbies and Urban America, Inc., called for long-term loans or loan guarantees, rather than outright subsidies...
...And Edmund N. Bacon, the respected Philadelphia planner, added that the new town is “representative of the American propensity, when faced with a problem, of changing the subject...
...We think the ideas in ‘The New City’ are the right ones...
...The subcommittee, chaired by Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe, is expected to confront the issue in depth this fall...
...If it can, will the now-fragile “new federalism” become strong enough to overcome the new town’s inherent tendency to overpromise and underdeliver...
...Boise-Cascade, a lumber and timber company, has bought two home-building firms (Perma-Built Enterprises and U.S...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan is executive secretary, has appointed a cabinet-level subcommittee on land use and new towns...
...Eighteen states have new towns but most are in the playland states of Arizona, Florida, and California...
...These criticisms are recognized by the more cautious exponents of new towns, Thus Paul Ylvisaker, a founder of the war on poverty and now Commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs, told a Congressional committee: I’ve considered carefully the subconscious motives behind it (the new town idea...
...In view of the impending policy decisions on new towns in the federal government, GE’s recommendations are worth quoting in some detail: It just makes sense that the power of eminent domain must be granted to private corporations or to state development corporations in order to assemble land in the right location and to take advantage of existing and planned public investment in highways, water works, sewage disposal facilities, airports, and railways...
...We’ve studied the matter now and we see positive advantages, provided that it’s done right...
...The proposed development corporations would not only be empowered to build new towns in the countryside, but also on the metropolitan fringe, within existing cities and, around small rural towns that are either dying or failing in growth...
...since World War I days...
...Other new towns are built by big national corporations with ready cash...
...As the Rand experts imported by Mayor John Lindsay learned, the clich6 “problems of the cities” masks a reality even more severe than they thought...
...Many developers, moreover, do not have the “patient” money available to Rouse...
...Perhaps more significantly, such influential black militants as Clarence Funnye, director of planning for the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, have spoken up forcefully against the separatists...
...Our goal is to make existing cities as good an investment as new towns and to use new towns to solve some of our problems...
...GE said it would maintain an “avid interest” in the city business and would re-enter it “under the proper combination of conditions” -meaning a federal subsidy similar to that for urban renewal...
...Jackson’s view is that the existing, modest prograin of federal assistance to new communities-which will guarantee debentures issued by builders in such communities - is probably not enough...
...Perhaps something similar to ‘urban renewal must be created, whereby land is assembled, master planned, zoned, and resold at a write-down to private builders by a local development authority...
...Although Gunther says that the 1967 riots did not cause the mayors’ change of heart, it is clear that the violence made a ghetto-dispersal policy much more attractive to big-city governments...
...Few families have acreage on hand covering four times the land area of Manhattan...
...The precedent for Jackson’s proposed state initiative is New York’s Urban Development Corporation, a Rockefeller-created authority with power to override local zoning codes, condemn and assemble land, and sponsor the construction of houses, factories, schools and parks...
...The new-town advocates ask: Need this growth replicate the urban sprawl of the 1950’s, with its waste of land, diseconomies of scale, and disregard of social needs...
...By HUD’s definition-a degree of self-sufficiency and a land area of at least 1,000 acres-there are only 64 new towns in America, 40 of them built in the last decade...
...Why will new towns allow or encourage this when it has eluded new neighborhoods, city or suburban, for 30 years...
...New communities on a large scale will not flourish, GE decided, until government agrees to help...
...Even though new towns on the magnitude envisioned in “The New City” would accommodate only one-fifth of the nation’s urban growth over the next 30 years, this is a substantial fraction...
...The old town offers no such respite...
...Not the least of the reasons is that the Administration declined to embrace...
...Can planned new towns help form the large markets required to give birth to a genuine mass-production housing industry in the United States...
...Even the widely praised Columbia, Maryland, built between Washington and Baltimare by developer lames Rouse, makes no pretension of relieving the ghettos of either city...
...Why will a new town make an industrialist more willing to invest in jobless workers than a city location...
...Louis symposium on new towns: “To my mind they are even immoral...
...Westinghouse is building Coral Springs, Florida (population 60,000), as an “urban laboratory’’ for its products...
...If not, what will have to be done to induce them to a new-town location...
...by Edmund B. Lambeth Writing two and a half years ago from Tarn House, Norwich, Vermont, H. Wentworth Eldredge, the Dartmouth urban scholar, looked at the near future of urban America: “At the present, there seems little likelihood, under the American federal governmental system, of making the necessary synthesis of city development, new towns and comprehensive transportation thinking in a national planned system, by regions...
...Eldredge’s forecast was nothing if not prescient...
...It is a fraction, moreover, that would drain away a commodity more scarce in America than land or mortgage money-urban management talent...
...A new-towns task force has been formed within Volpe’s department, and Sherman Unger, the ambitious and alert general counsel of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is taking a team of experts to Britain to study new-town financing and building techniques...
...The municipal lobbies, adamantly opposed to new towns when the issue first came up in 1964, changed to support in 1967...
...What would the public gain in return for such a subsidy...
...Politically, the climate for new towns, linked closely to a national urban policy, has never been better...
...New towns will figure prominently in the hearings, which will attempt to massage the Congressional central nervous system enough to make “urban growth”-and thus new towns-an actionable issue...
...At the state level, legislation must be created that will permit the developer to retain a measure of control over planning, zoning, and community services for an agreed-upon development period, sd that a dissident group cannot thwart financial planning or the very concept itself...
...Tax restraint must be exercised to relieve the financial burden on the developer in the early stages...
...When the state or local development authority begins searching for tracts large enough for new towns, what will govern the price paid for the land...
...They range in projected population from 10,000 (Joppatowne, in Harford County, Maryland) to 600,000 (California City, in Kern County, California...
...The idea of new towns fits well with what little accepted wisdom there is in the inchoate field of urban affairs...
...GE concluded that the risk was too high and the profits too slow...
...There are some caveats to the building of new towns, but there is more to the idea than escapism and there are ways of nourishing the new withoGt starving the old...
...Their stated reason is that, properly conceived and administered, new towns could relieve existing cities, particularly when it comes to the shortage of decent houses and jobs...
...As Morton Hoppenfeld, Columbia’s chief planner, candidly explains: “Columbia was designed to be attractive to that majority segment of the population which is economically viable in the market...
...Several strategically placed Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and Mayors have put their signatures on a report called “The New City,” which urges the creation, with federal assistence, of 100 new towns of 100,000 population and 10 with a population of one million...
...And yet on the other hand, lacking population control, some form of ordered expansion of urbanization cannot be far ahead and federal legislation to that effect seems to be just around the corner, resting heavily on private experience, as it should, in our very mixed economy...
...If autonomous new towns are the goal, can it be assumed that industry and business will voluntarily locate there to provide jobs for the new residents...
...To the urban developer, h *iew town is what forgiveness is to the sinner or town drunk: a fresh start spiritually, the opportunity to begin from scratch...
...HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Metropolitan Development, Samuel C. Jackson, has urged that states charter urban development corporations, which would give them the eminent-domain powers needed to assemble land for new communities...
...Certainly the new town in this sense is a healthy concept and I am among those who welcome it...
...the politics are new, the land is clear, and even the zoning laws might be changed...
Vol. 1 • October 1969 • No. 9
